blipshift

How did you choose to go into the “a t-shirt a day” business?
After many years of going to bars wearing less than awesome promotional car-themed tees, we realized that perhaps neon colors on an oversized shirt wasn’t helping our mingling potential. There are a number of companies offering crowdsourced t-shirt designs on a limited basis, but nothing for car guys like us. We figured it was about time that auto enthusiasts got a chance to get some fresh and witty apparel. We’re also super psyched to be giving artists from around the world another avenue to share their work. Collectively, we have experience in tech, fashion and manufacturing so we were able to get moving pretty quickly. We keep things pretty casual over here and make sure to have a good time doing what we’re doing. That is unless you show up to work not wearing your blipshift tee… in that case you start your day with three sets of push-ups.

On that note, what made you decide that the automotive puns would be your niche?
Despite what our better halves think, “car guy” isn’t just one type of dude (or dudette). There is a huge amount of diversity in this niche, if you can call it that – we think of it as massive interest group. We like hanging out with other car guys and gals, talking about all things auto and of course, telling stories. This is what gives us and artist contributors inspiration for design sweetness that car guys “get”. If you want a sci-fi or pop culture t-shirt, there are plenty of places online you can find one. But if you want a riff on the latest racing news or car blog meme there’s only one, blipshift.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
As a small business, we need to be growing the company, not spending hours optimizing shipping costs or standing in line. We knew early on that our focus needed be on creating awesome products, keeping customers happy and developing our brand. Dealing with order fulfillment and the post office can be pretty painful. It’s a thankless job that can take a bunch of time. We also don’t want to spend time building infrastructure where great tools already exist. ShipStation was super easy to setup and integrated with our e-commerce platform. Because it’s in the cloud, we’ve got a ton of flexibility on how we manage shipments and labels. Batching up a large number of orders is really simple and the ShipStation interface helps to reduce knucklehead errors. It definitely feels good to know that ShipStation provides reliable service and a big feature set that is able to scale as our business grows.

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
Reports. We don’t just gobble up numbers and specs from the latest Porsche review. We’re suckers for metrics and any piece of data that provides us with more visibility on our business. The ShipStation reports are really great at giving us a quick view on our operations and fulfillment costs. ShipStation also makes it really easy for us to cross reference orders for customer support cases. When you’ve got a loyal following with customers ordering 5, 10 or even 20 times, it’s important for us to have visibility and easy access to the shipping history. By the way, does the sound of a team of label printers running in the background count as a feature? ‘cuz that’s awesome too.